One of them stood, looking uneasy. “We found shoe prints. Smaller than yours, maybe a woman’s. They stop right here.” He pointed toward the ledge.
I looked down at the lake yawning below, where the dark pit swallowed the light. Rocks littered the edges. “No,” I whispered. “No, she—she wouldn’t—” The deputyreached for me, but I jerked away. “She didn’t jump,” I said. “She didn’t.”
He didn’t argue. That scared me more than if he had. I backed away, shaking. My flashlight beam cut across the mud, catching another set of tracks, heavier and overlapping hers. A man’s boots. Going the same direction.
“Wait,” I said hoarsely. “There’s more here.”
The deputy followed my light. “We’ll take a look. Step back, please. We’re marking them. Deputy,” he called, indicating an older gentleman who was already moving toward us. “Can you escort Ms. Harper back to the staging area?”
Numb, I allowed myself to be led back, my mind reeling with the new direction my life was taking. Where was she? She wouldn’t jump, would she? She’d had something to tell me. She wanted my help.Oh God.
Nolan looked insufferable, lounging at the command tent when we returned. It was obvious he hadn’t been searching for long (if at all). While I was soaking wet, with mud caked everywhere from my knees down, he was bone dry and wearing clean loafers. His cherubic face turned toward me, his nose wrinkling a little as he took me in from head to toe.
“You’re in a state. Any news?” he asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t find anything.” He took a sip of his coffee, the steam rising like a halo over his eyebrows, but I could smell the alcohol even from here.
“Footprints,” I said flatly. “Two sets.” There was no way that I’d agree that one of those prints was Jane’s. That was a path I wasn’t ready to take because that might mean that she’d gone over into that dark water.
He froze. “Hers?” Nolan shook his head as if trying to clear the cobwebs. “Someone was out there?”
Everything in me went on alert. “What does that mean? Did you know she was out here? You said she went for a walk, but why would she be walking out here?” I asked quietly. Cocking my head to look at him, I tried to imagine her driving out here to meet with him, coaxing her from the car, and walking her to the ledge. Shoving her over.
His jaw clenched. “No. Of course not. Why would you even think that?”
I held his gaze. I’d known him for years, long enough to recognize the flicker — the half-second delay that made me doubt him.
“You said she went for a walk.” The rest stop where her car was found was halfway between their expensive suburban house and the college campus where she taught classes three days a week.
“That’s what she said.” His mouth flattened. “I wasn’t her keeper, Hattie. Jane was an adult. She was her own person.”
When they wereflush at the beginning of their relationship, Jane was head over heels for Nolan, and they were already inseparable. She had swooned over him, and he had doted on her, but I didn’t realize until later how he’d tried to control her. How that initial crush turned into something he distorted into ugliness.
“Was? You fucker.” Rage and bile swam in my gut. Flying forward, I threw myself at him. “Don’t talk about her like she’s gone. She’s not.” My fists were flailing as I hit him over and over again. Vaguely, I realized that Nolan was pushing me away and putting up his arms, but it wasn’t until a few deputies pulled me away that I took a heaving breath.
Nolan had blood streaming from his nose. “You crazy bitch.” He shook a finger at me. “I want to press charges. That was assault.”
One of the deputies shrugged. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about. You must have tripped. Do you need a medic?”
Wrapping my arms around my stomach, I tried not to throw up as Nolan argued with them. He’d already written off his wife, or worse, he had killed her. My sister was gone.
I sat on the hood of my car as the search lights flickered across the trees, as Nolan drove away. Good riddance. Divers had been called in to drag the lake, making me shiver thinking about the possibility of my sister beingdown in the water, her body floating like some lost mermaid who’d forgotten how to breathe.
I pressed record on my phone and whispered:
“My sister is missing, and I think her husband is a suspect. We found her car at a rest stop with the door open. The cops say that she could have just left her shit bag of a husband, but why would she leave the car behind? It doesn’t make any sense.”
By the second day,the woods had given nothing back. Not a shoe. Not a body. Nothing.
They’d drug the lake and found nothing. The sheriff had warned me that it wasn’t impossible for the divers not to find a body in the lake at these temperatures, and he wasn’t fully convinced about the runaway line he was pitching me.
Nolan had come back to stand by his sedan while they were wrapping things up, talking to one of the deputies. He was crying — the kind of dry, careful crying that photographs well for the media. He had that down already, the public grief. But his eyes were clear when they landed on me. Fucking psycho.
I recorded it just in case I needed it later. The way his thumb rubbed his wedding ring. The absence of mud on his shoes. The fact that he hadn’t once gone into thosewoods himself after that first time. All of that stuff made him a suspect in my book. Not to mention the fact that he’d slipped into the past tense already. Asshole.
The sheriff approached, hat in hand like a man delivering bad news to a neighbor. “Ms. Harper, we’re suspending the ground search for now unless something new comes to light.” His eyes shifted past me, surveying the woods surrounding the tiny rest area, which was nothing more than a postage stamp next to the freeway. Sure, the woods led to a recreation area and then to the lake, but that was it. Then it bordered another freeway. We both knew there were countless other options if she had been taken. Someone could have thrown her in a car and just… driven away. Anywhere.
“It’sHattie,” I said automatically.
He cleared his throat. “Right. Hattie. We’ll continue to investigate. If anything turns up, you’ll get a call. We’ve talked to her husband, but it seems as if they were having trouble at home.” He shrugged as if that answered everything.
